Your NFT is Racist, Transphobic, Fat-Phobic, and Rooted in Anti-Blackness

It is a picture of neo-chibi cartoon wearing cat ears and blushing.

Jun 10, 2022

In an earlier post, I wrote a semi-frivolous pledge to “Stay and Die,” a promise to remain in the realm of the physical/material world should the day ever come that I am given the ultimatum to upload my body into a digital utopia server. It was silly, hyperbolic, maybe a little tongue-in-cheek OR maybe the sort of thing that someone ostracized from the cultural hegemony writes to pump themselves up enough to start doomsday prepping.

There is absolutely no chance I’ll survive a cataclysmic event, whether that event be nuclear war, zombie apocalypse, or global pandemic. I can barely make it through the day without a variety of tinctures and gadgets, so I doubt I’ll make it out there on the road with mutants stalking about demanding I turn over all of my possessions. So I’m not sure there’s any point in me doomsday prepping, especially because I feel overwhelmed with the simple prospect of pre-choosing replacement items for my Instacart order.

I don’t know my friends, things are grim but how much can I complain? It’s probably better here than other parts of the world. I saw a widely-circulated meme from Tanzania today that showed a woman who grew horse legs because she slept with a married man. The level of credulity in the comments section seemed high, and I’m getting to the point that I can’t rule it out. Not necessarily because I have a strong belief in mystical punishments of the equine sort, but because I’m not certain I have that strong of a grip on reality myself. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know if growing horse legs is normal or not. My brain is a little fuzzy and I feel like one feels when they wake and realize that something they took for granted in their dream defies a law of nature: your car was flying, a volcano was in downtown Chicago, you were best friends with Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

I wake up from nightmares in a non-plussed sort of way. I use to come out of them in a state of startled convulsion, my heart beating through my chest and my eyes bleeding...shot? Bloodshot. I was filled with a sense of relief as I slowly re-acclimated to “actual” reality. I was not, in fact, late for school. I was not, in fact, in 7th grade anymore. Everything was fine. I could go enjoy my morning cereal, something since ruined by the evil scientists who discovered that eating the same thing as cattle every morning was perhaps not the best choice for your health.

The nightmares got no less scary, but reality started to seem like less and less of a reprieve; there were no more Frosted Flakes waiting for me on the other side. Only my bleary-eyed morning routine that involves taking several medicines and vitamins, the majority of which I suspect do nothing. Then off to my office where I can sit and think about how terrible everything is now. I sit and write essays about returning to tradition and nature and the law, essays that would have made a younger version of me puke.

When I was 8 I was walking behind my grandfather as he descended my basement stairs. He took each step individually and made sure his foot was firmly planted before advancing to the next. As a kid, running up and down stairs, playing on them and under them, and jumping up and off of them seemed to be an important thing. Waiting and watching him filled me for the first time with a sense of mortality, a sense of unavoidable decline. I vowed in that moment to never walk down stairs slowly; to this day I take stairs briskly no matter how sick or injured I am.

I made similar promises of eternal youth as I got older. Promised myself I’d always keep up with the music and go out of my way to identify with the trends and politicking of the youth. I was downtown one day and saw a man in his 60s swing around a curve with a top-down convertible VW Bug. “The Distance” by Cake was blaring at full-volume. I turned to my friend and said, “that’s what I’m going to be like.” Even recounting this now fills me with a sense of embarrassment, even though you weren’t there. Even though I never did turn out like that.

Succumbing to aging means you take stairs more slowly and eventually it also means that stop being able to listen to the music anymore. All of the female artists seem to bleed into one another, by the time I can tell the difference between Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Demi Lovato, I see them on Joe Rogan talking about their struggles with Bulimia “back when” they were in the prime of their fame. I’m not even trying to recognize the names of the cohort of artists who came after them. It’s past the point of being worth the effort.

Seems sometimes that everything I was going for in my youth has turned to ashes in my mouth. Thought I’d be in my 50s smoking cigs on an outdoor patio of a Parisian cafe. Now I couldn’t even imagine myself spending more than five days in Paris (especially since seeing the Eiffel Tower apparently disappoints some people so much they kill themselves). Anyway if I do end up going, I’ll be sure to find a city not so unlike mine, with curated hyperreal versions of things designed to give you an impression of an impression of an impression. They will probably keep up the illusion as long as they can, but real-heads know the truth: other than the weather, the internet makes it so that every “Western” city is pretty much the same. Even our regional dialects are disappearing in the US, which explains why I feel some measure of rage when I hear a new Chicago transplant from beneath the Mason-Dixon line concocting an over-wrought Southern drawl. Don’t lie to me: your accent is as boring as mine. Shove your sweet tea up your ass.

Everything is concocted, and maybe it always has been. I’ve started buying and selling NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens) recently, mostly out of boredom and also because I am currently in “like” with someone I’ve been seeing and so I’m trying to fill my time with actual other things that excite me rather than just pretending I’m doing anything other than just waiting for their call. (“Oh, Wednesday night? Yeah let me check my calendar and see if that’s open (looks at wall for 9 seconds) yeah actually that should work.”)

If you haven’t scrolled through a gallery of NFTs just yet, you should give it a try. You’ll quickly find that the majority of them are bizarrely similar. They all have a pastel color-scheme just shy of neon, the sort of soft hues that an advertisement for “in your home online counseling for women” might use to show you that they’re professional, but also your first session is gonna feel like it’s “just us girls.” All in all the designs are grotesque, with each character’s facial expressions looking something akin to the zoomed in stills from an episode of Ren & Stimpy, yet lacking any interesting or nauseating topography (i.e. body horror).

If you’re curious and want to buy one, this one is currently on auction for 666 ethereum, or $1,197,854.28:

“Bored Ape Yacht Club” NFT available on OpenSea

Get it while supplies last! Which they probably will last because…well you could literally make one of these whenever you want.

You could probably make your own NFT and post it on the market within the next hour. It likely won’t sell, especially if you haven’t spent much time in that space and don’t have a sense what people are looking for, but you definitely could do it. A lot of people think the NFT represents the height of commercial/capitalist decadence. That obscene amounts of money are being paid for what are essentially MS Paint files. But really, what is so shocking about this? If you were to buy a canvas and rub some paint on there with a brush, is it not the same as doing it on a computer? Sure, a computer might have some tricks and shortcuts that take the need for craft and precision out of it, but far be it from me to claim that it’s not “art.” And because the NFT is on the blockchain, they are mathematically “one of a kind,” perhaps even more so than paintings that are very often counterfeited and resold for astronomical prices that dwarf our friendly ape picture above.

Also, much like “modern” or “contemporary” art (I know they’re not the same but I’m trying to refer to art that was created after the advent of photography, when realism was no longer an extremely high value of a painting), there often seems to be no rhyme or reason why people gravitate toward one piece over another. The arbitrary nature of these preferences also seems to feed into the general sense of dismissiveness/acrimony toward both abstract paintings and NFTs alike. Strangely, however, most people would accuse an NFT of being more fake simply because - unlike a Jackson Pollack - you can’t even hold an NFT in your hand. Fake!

But to those who foist this accusation I ask thee: why are some winter jackets $900 while some are $39.99? Is it truly the quality of fabric, the feel of it on your skin, the placement of the pocket “just so” to facilitate maximal ease of penetrative reach? Or is it more likely that the value of it is based on some mixture of quality/practicality/cost of production and also some other arbitrary reasons like brand recognition, design appeal, and whatever “narrative” has been created around the jacket and/or presumed (or presumed to be presumed) of those who wear it.

Consumer choices - especially for things we put on our bodies or walls or in our garage - often represent our investment in an object that captures for a us a certain je ne sais qois. In a more abstract way, we use our dollars to “vote” on certain looks, styles, builds, brands, etc. We make investments in ourself and our reputations by adorning ourselves in, attaching ourselves to, or situating ourselves within things that we believe demonstrate value, whatever we determine that value to be. It’s no surprise then that most NFTs are bland, edgy in a comfortable and conforming way, and accessorized with a variety of cutesy or kitschy details called “properties.” Some of these properties are even ranked by rarity in a collection.

Just as I finished that last paragraph, a bid came through to buy my most prized NFT (the “milady,” of course). They offered around $400 to buy this:

If you’re surprised by the offer, don’t be. This particular milady (#1737) might only have a “drip-grade” of C, but there’s a lot more to her than that. Just check out her rarity stats and see for yourself:

Nope, you don’t have to rub your eyes or pinch yourself - you read it right the first time. This Pale-Raced Milady has a Peter Pan Collared shirt (only 2% of the 10k total have this) as well as a MEEDLES HEADBAND (only 1% also have this). I think if you scroll up and look at her again, you’ll see she glows a little brighter than the first time you laid eyes on her. Needless to say I find the $400 bid insulting.

I chose to buy something from this particular NFT collection because of a recent drop in value, which was due to a somewhat true, somewhat contrived, and mostly bad-faith smear campaign. Most of it had to do with the artists’ 2019 online persona that she first denied (which pretty much made it go away) and then later admitted to it (which made the campaign happen all over again). While most people who were aware of her alter-ego “Miya” (who did say some nasty shit), most people understood that account to be something akin to performance art, a “fast and loose and schizo” type of being online that was once endemic to edgelords the early 2010s, a fact that everyone pretends to not remember. The same reason that our soup-brained culture has trouble differentiating characters from actors and characters’ opinions from author’s opinions is the same reason they have trouble metabolizing Miya (a “creative embodiment”) in any way other than at point-blank range, i.e. “she said bad words and so she is bad.”

Nevertheless, the damage was done, she admitted to it, and stepped away from the project. And so again, the price tumbled to a point at which I could access the collection. It wasn’t just the drop in price that prompted me to invest, it was also the narrative around it.

First of all, the picture itself (prior to the controversy) contains all of the components of the million dollar ape one I posted above: it has a unique design, a definitive aesthetic, lots of quirky little properties, and a central character of focus. But the way that it differs I think comes down to a choice, and it's a choice I stand behind: the choice to express yourself in a singular way that first and foremost represents the artists’ taste rather than the presumed taste of their audience. In this way, I actually like how the miladies look because of the way that I didn’t initially like how they look. I care about that much less because I know that this piece is a peek inside the brain of the artist rather than the artist’s attempt to peek into mine. That’s what this “art” thing is all about in my book.

I also enjoyed the controversy. The shit that this artist (allegedly) pulled in those early pandemic days was admittedly gross and reprehensible. I don’t know how much is true and I don’t really care to sift through all of the screen caps and think pieces to find out. I don’t actually care at all. They very well may have been racist, bullying, mean-spirited, and annoying. But also - it was three years ago. I feel strongly that the choices we make in one epoch of our lives should not determine our fate forever. I want to believe that people can grow and change and put goodness and light into the world even if they spilled poison into it when they were in a different place in their lives.

And also - perhaps most importantly - I don’t care. I think that the actual harm done by this is an overstatement, a feeling state summoned from nothing that suggests a level of harm that borders on the absurd. The most maximal of these claims is that the Miya account lead to a suicide of a 17-year old because the “cult” that Charlotte was a leader of (not a cult) suggested there was a cyberpunk afterlife waiting for us all.

😐

I think it’s pathetic to think that things we buy are somehow political expressions of our “self,” when in reality they are far more based on impulses generated by our neurological and endocrine systems, for deeply seated and symbolic reasons written in a psychic language we sometimes understand but cannot speak. Buying milady was not a political expression for me, it was a personal delight. What I am saying is that I felt compelled to buy this NFT for many of the same reasons we feel compelled to buy anything: because I was drawn to it. Because it made me feel good to look at it and think about it. I liked the idea of myself owning it. Do I have a particular fondness for “a neochibi aesthetic inspired by Tokyo street style tribes?” No! Do I think the picture is fun and funny? Yes! Is that not enough for you? No? Well who cares and fuck you very much (directed at non-subscribers of this opinion only)

There is, however, one part of my owning a milady that I’ll admit does seem political in nature, insofar as it is willful, stubborn, absurd, and could be a bit revelatory of my “selfhood” to others. But these are all consequences of this reason, not the cause. I did indeed reject that $400 offer from moments ago, and it’s not because I think I’m going to get a better one. Perhaps I will, I hope I might, but the more reasonable parts of me are pretty sure the price of the milady is going to hang around where it is now or even dip a little lower. I can’t really imagine a situation that would suddenly renew interest in this commodity, especially as the artist has removed herself from the project and therefore will not be adding to the collection for the foreseeable future (something that could stimulate renewed interested).

Any upshots from here on out are due only to mystical vibe shifts beyond any of our control or comprehension. So then why keep? The real reason for this is going to sound tragically stupid to the point of laughable no matter how I say it. But the reason is so personal and so “me” that actually, me not caring how you react to it is an essential part of the what this process does for me.

Okay, here goes:

On a very basic level, I believe that we are being pulled more and more out of our bodies every day. Our online personas are slowly becoming more “us” than our bodies in the physical world. As we become fatter and sicker and older, it’s getting harder and harder to demonstrate in anything but abstract spiritual terms why remaining inside of our bodies is valuable. And while I’ve recently been convinced that full-cognitive upload is likely not possible (to a level of simply disposing of our physical body and plugging our consciousness into a USB drive), I still do think that ultimatums are going to placed on us regarding whether or not we choose to “keep up with the Joneses” in terms of how much we live online. In other words, we are going to be asked more and more often to “be online” rather than “be ourselves.” In fact, it has already started happening!

I wrote before how badly I wanted to throw my cell phone into a lake. How much checking my emails and DMs and notifications was making my life immeasurably worse, my own sort of Sartrean “Techno-Nausea.” How I feel increasingly more tethered to my phone and less connected to nature, my family, my friends, and myself. How this disconnect makes me sick and unhappy. And yet - I don’t think I could keep a job (i.e. support myself) without a phone that has email on it. It just wouldn’t work. And even worse, I don’t think I’d be able to maintain a lot of my friendships with a phone that doesn’t have texting. Not that any of them would mean to, but I would simply be de facto excluded from more and more of the conversations that serve as the velcro holding together friendships especially on the current situation of “Earth: Pandemic Edition.”

Each day, in many spoken and unspoken way, I am asked to turn more and more of myself over to the digital space; to see the internet as more “real” than myself. To replace thoughts of the transcendent with thoughts of “the cloud” (the implications of that nomenclature specifically, are nothing short of sickening). And you know what? I do it. I bend over for social media networks, online forums, LinkedIn profiles, chat rooms, dating sites, location trackers, and so many more make-believe places. I am forced each day to face the fact that all of my contrarian, revolutionary ideas about “how to live the good life” are completely flaccid and fake. The reality is that I am no different than any other wage-cuck laying down his selfhood in order to be logged, tracked, categorized, tabulated, and quantified just like everyone else.

There is but one piece of me that I still keep close to me and do not give away: what I like. Sure, they can tell me what to do and what to say and how to stand for whatever they want, and like a good little bitch boy I must comply lest I’m sent to the HR tribunal and sentenced to social death. But they cannot choose what I think and feel. They cannot change my preferences or tastes. They can’t decide what turns me on or what holds my interest. That is the terrain of the mind that even the powerful social panopticon of 2022 cannot fully venture into. Alas, even if you put my brain in a jar and filled it with lies - there still must be a brain there to be lied to (ht: Descartes). And that brain is my own!

So yes - you can jack up the price of “Bored Ape Yacht Club” until Washington’s picture on the dollar bill is replaced by this:

You can print it on t-shirts and billboards and have celebrities shill it all over the red carpet and Super Bowl Commercials. You can make it clear that ape is GOOD and milady is EVIL AND RACIST AND SUICIDAL. You can even punish me for merely liking it. You can do that thing you love to do where “if a person is X bad thing, they are also Y bad thing, and why not also Z, Z+1, Z+2, Z+n bad things as well?”

You can tell me that I shouldn’t get mad about it if I think it’s unfair. You can tell me that getting mad about it proves that I’m guilty of it. You can have me renounce it in public. You can struggle session me on Twitter and quote tweet me and have all of your reply-guys and OF simps sling mud at my face and hit me over the head with a belt buckle. You can advance your not-so-subtle implication that someone who likes an artist’s work also then must agree with the artist’s worldview (perhaps one of the most evil syllogisms that’s arisen out of the crypto-transhumanist movement). Do the thing that you always do, gleefully dancing on my persona’s corpse and then stand up on top of it like you’re on a first place pulpit as the blood drains out of me in an expanding maroon pool below. Whatever you want, chief. You’re the boss.

…But you still can’t stop me from liking it. That part of me will not be uploaded to the cloud. You can do whatever you want to me, but you can’t stop me from liking milady.